Hacker who infected 72K computers gets prison sentence

After pleading guilty last year to creating a botnet that wreaked havoc on about 72,000 computers, Joshua Schichtel was sentenced to prison today. The Department of Justice announced that Schichtel received a 30-month prison sentence for “selling command-and-control access to and use of thousands of malware-infected computers.”
Schichtel was a unique hacker. Rather than infecting computers for his own benefit, he instead sold botnets to customers who must have not had the tech know-how to create their own malware.
“Individuals who wanted to infect computers with various different types of…